Universities 'must lower entry standards'

By John Clare, Education Editor

12:01AM BST 23 Sep 2003

Good universities will have to admit more poorly qualified students from disadvantaged backgrounds if they want to charge higher fees, and there are at least nine ways they can go about it, a Government committee said yesterday.

It acknowledged that A-level grades were the best guide to academic success and that there was no evidence of any university discriminating against applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Young people from such backgrounds were under-represented because they failed to achieve the necessary grades. Only 23 per cent of those from manual backgrounds gained two or more A-levels by the age of 18 compared with 47 per cent from non-manual backgrounds.

However, Prof Steven Schwartz, the vice-chancellor of Brunel and the committee's chairman, said universities were not admitting enough "non-traditional" students and were insufficiently aware of the "educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body".

The most obvious solution was to ask applicants from lower social classes and low-achieving schools for lower A-level grades, as about half of universities already did.

That recognised the obstacles such applicants had overcome and took account of the fact that "merit is measured not only by where one stands, but by how far one had to go to get there".

Universities had to ensure that students admitted with lower marks would be able to complete their courses without academic standards being further lowered.

Other ways - none of them problem-free - of admitting more disadvantaged students included taking their "position in class" into account, guaranteeing places to a top percentage in every school or college, setting applicants an American-style scholastic ability test, interviewing applicants, favouring those who would be the first in their family to go to university, and finding objective ways of judging how well organised applicants were, how well they worked independently, how motivated they were to learn and how interested they were in the subject they planned to study.

Prof Schwartz said the committee had deliberately come up with more questions than answers because it wanted to know what the public thought would lead to a fair and equitable admissions system.

Alan Johnson, the higher education minister, said universities seeking Government permission to charge higher fees from 2006 would have to prove that applicants from poorer backgrounds were "not disadvantaged but encouraged and enabled" to enter.